English 380

Research and Essay on Critical Approaches to a Literary Text

The purpose of this project is to examine the critical positions or assumptions underlying a range of critical discussions on a single literary text. In so doing, you’ll gain a sense of how theory guides critical practice, and you’ll develop criteria for evaluating contemporary literary criticism.

For the presentation and final essay, I’m asking you to find, analyze and evaluate 4-5 critical discussions (essays or parts of books) representing a range of approaches or critical orientations to a particular literary text. As with any research project, you’ll need to plan and engage in the work in stages. I’ve laid out the basic stages, and due dates, below.

1. Choosing a literary text

The text on which you choose to research criticism should be a single literary work written in English: a novel, a short story, a play, a poem. To ensure that you find a variety of critical approaches, the literary work you choose should be written and published before 1950 or so, and should have attracted a fairly substantial body of criticism. The work should also, of course, be one you’re genuinely interested in.

You’ll present your choice of a text in class on Mon. 10/25.

2. Locating criticism

For books, the best place to start is with Long Library’s holdings on the author. In addition to critical works on the literary text you’re researching, look also at bibliographies in these and other texts for intriguing titles (the Norton anthologies have updated bibliographies on many writers and texts).

For essays, your best resource is the MLA (Modern Language Association) on-line bibliography, available on First Search.

Because you may want to request titles from interlibrary loan, you should begin your research early. Two cautions: don’t request Ph.D. dissertations, because they take too long to get and usually haven’t been submitted to the same research and editorial standards as published texts, and don’t become obsessed with obtaining a particular work. If you can’t find something fairly easily, move on.

3. Selecting criticism for the presentation and essay

Since your aim is to examine a range of criticism on the literary text you’ve chosen, you will need to find more critical works than you end up analyzing. Finding critical works that span several decades almost ensures you’ll be able to select 4-5 representing a variety of approaches. Titles may signal the author’s approach directly, especially in more recent criticism. The type of publication can sometimes indicate how useful a work might be for your purposes. Some university presses publish books in a series devoted to a particular critical approach, such as feminism or New Historicism, and some scholarly journals signal their bent in their title or subtitle.

By Monday 11/15 you should have chosen the critical texts you plan to use in your presentation and essay.

4. Analyzing the critic’s approach and critical assumptions

In more recent critical works, the writer may well define her or his approach in the introduction to the essay or book. The critic might, for instance, say “My methodology will be mainly rhetorical” (Jonathan Hart, “Narratorial Strategies in The Rape of Lucrece,” Studies in English Literature, 1992) or “I am interested in how ideology both produces and is produced by literary and critical texts” (Jane O. Newman, “And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness: Philomela, Female Violence and Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 1990).

In other instances, you may have to infer the critic’s theoretical approach or assumptions from his or her method. Keep in mind that although some critics have clearly aligned themselves with a particular approach or school (formalist, or psychoanalytic, or Marxist, or feminist), others may combine approaches or methods. Trying to place a critic according to Abrams’s map may help you identify general areas of concern and begin to see overlap and difference between critical texts. Your ability to recognize critical approaches will also increase over the next weeks as we read more, so don’t worry if you can’t identify a critic’s approach immediately.

On Monday, 12/6 you’ll present the results of your research to the class, identifying and briefly analyzing the critical approaches of your 4-5 sources.

5. The essay

Your 8-10 page essay will be “metacritical” in that you will examine critically the 4-5 essays/books you select. The essay should begin with discussion of why the particular literary text you’ve chosen has provoked so much, and so varied, criticism. In the body of the essay, discuss the 4-5 critical works in the order in which they were written or published, so that you can follow lines of development or critical disagreement. With each text, you should briefly and fairly summarize the argument, then analyze and evaluate the critic’s approach. Along the way, you should compare critics’ interpretations and methods, locating areas of overlap and disagreement. Conclude the essay with consideration of what might be next on the critical horizon for this literary text: a particular aspect of the text, or a particular approach, you feel the critics have overlooked or underemphasized.

The essay is due to my office on Thursday 12/16 by 5:00 p.m.